When ‘Things Fall Apart’: Thinking Through Absurdity with Arendt and Aseyev

Hannah Arendt notably remarked that thinking, understood as the non-conclusive inner dialogue of “me” with “myself,” is most indispensable in those historical moments when “things fall apart.” War often occasions such moments, not just because of the moral and political turmoil that accompanies it or the physical damage it inflicts upon people and their environments, but also because of its absurdity; this latter feature, the absurdity of war, is captured by Stanislav Aseyev, a Donetsk-born Ukrainian writer, in his books In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas and The Torture Camp on Paradise Street. In this essay, I argue that Aseyev’s reflections on Russian occupation, imprisonment, and torture demonstrate both the special value of Arendt’s “thinking” for those enduring war and violence and reveal a pre-moral-political capacity of “thinking” latent but never explicit in Arendt’s work: the power to cope with the absurd qua absurd.